ALAN says…

On iOS, apps for cloud­based ser­vices tend to leave it up to you what is down­loaded to en­able off­line work­ing. If you have a rel­a­tively small amount of data in a ser­vice such as Drop­box, we agree it’s silly you can’t tell the app to keep a lo­cal copy of it all. A Drop­box ac­count can store much more (1TB) than the most ca­pa­cious iOS de­vices, so it makes a com­pro­mise.

Ap­ple has started to deal with this more clev­erly with iCloud Drive; Sierra can re­move files from your Mac if they haven’t been used for a while, but keeps copies in iCloud in case you need them; they look like they’re where you stored them on your Mac, though, and are down­loaded if you try to open them.

We hope that in­tel­li­gent anal­y­sis of file us­age gets eas­ier for de­vel­op­ers to use, so that third-party apps can eas­ily im­ple­ment be­hav­iour sim­i­lar to iCloud Drive’s on Sierra. With­out that, sadly we’re re­liant on our cho­sen ser­vices build­ing sim­i­lar be­hav­iour – or a con­ve­nience such as a ‘keep a lo­cal copy of ev­ery­thing’ switch – in to their own apps from scratch. Fea­tures like these are another thing, be­sides price and ca­pac­ity, to con­sider when you’re pick­ing a cloud ser­vice to use.